2013-08-28T11:09:28+02:00http://fablabstarter.com/Octopress2013-08-28T11:04:00+02:00http://fablabstarter.com/blog/2013/08/28/fablabs-lessons-learnedI didn’t post much during the last month, but I think I learned a few things about FabLabs and am eager to share these findings with you.

But first, a short recap. I started this blog talking about sustainability and how it could be achieved, I also spoke about techniques to discover and learn what is the bare minimum service one could foresee for a FabLab. Finally I discussed about the role makers and FabLabs should play in the society in the near future.

I spent the last weeks trying to get my lab en route, talking a lot with people in the maker movement, following all FabLabs I could find on twitter, looking at what other people in the world are doing.

So let’s get back to what I learned.

FabLabs need founders

I think one of the most immediate finding, yet probably one of the most underestimated, is about people. I learned most successful FabLabs have been built around the will and energy and resources of few strongly motivated individuals.

It’s not just a matter of leadership, with time, as the organization grows, more people start sharing work and duties. Truth is it takes lot of energy and free time to make up something worth, possibly even more if it’s done with scarce resources and in a non profit fashion.

For someone who is just at the beginning of this journey I must recognize it takes really lots of effort. Based on my experience in the startup world, I might say the two ventures require a similar amount of work.

So the lesson learned here it’s the following: if you plan to start a FabLab make sure you have it very high on your personal priority list, be prepared to devote all your spare time to it, and not just for the few months before opening, but in an ongoing fashion, at least for few years.

FabLabs need space

Some tutorials, including the popular FabLab instructable might tell you can start a FabLab in your own garage. While that’s possible, I wonder how many of you have all the safety gear, insurance, visibility, and physical space needed in your garage!

About space, machines needed for building stuff are not that small, a laser cutter might take the space of a small van, and that’s just one of the thing you need to hack some complete project.

If you want to host 3d printers you need proper ventilation, as fumes produced by melting plastics are proven to be hazardous for health.

If you want to sustain you venture with workshops and training, you also need to have access to a proper classroom or conference room.

Finally, if you want to have your lab grow out of your friends circle, you need some place which can be reached easily by young people, either by foot, bike or public transport.

As a side-note You should also ask yourself what could happen if something goes wrong with a machine, and someone gets hurt. Who will be responsible for that? Easy question: the founders!

Lesson learned: you should have both first-aid kits, fire extinguishers and a proper insurance in place before even thinking to let someone enter your lab.

FabLab manifesto asks for safety to be a main concern. Guess what, it all started in a university funded lab where everything I’m mentioning here was already in place before even getting started!

FabLabs need money

Yes it doesn’t sound cool, but the hard truth is that. You don’t need lots of money, you can save a lot from voluntary work, building your machines, donated hardware, recycling stuff. Put off at least 10k euros as a bare minimum.

But you also need to find a space and pay the bills. If you are lucky enough you can find a company or institution paying for that, you can even think to occupy some space! Any of these options will affect what you will be able to do in your FabLab. But you will have lots of money to pay if you don’t, that’s for sure (about 2k euros / month on my estimates).

If you find the money for space, initial setup and bills for the first few months of operation, your not even halfway there. You’ll need a continuos stream of income just to keep the lab open.

Lesson learned: most of the money used by the FabLab will be spent during its lifetime, not when you open it.

FabLabs need a business model

In order to achieve a continuos stream of income and afford to keep the lab open for a long time, a business model must be found for the FabLab.

The FabWiki provides a short, but complete list of things you will be able to do to get money and pay bills, but only after you open to the public. Each comes with pros and cons:

Company sponsor

Many important FabLabs have gone this route. A company finds interesting funding the FabLab or a Company is founded by the FabLab people.

This allows for instance the sharing of machines and spaces, especially when there is a crossing between the activity of the two entities. Another immediate benefit for the company is to easily recruit talents coming from the FabLab, and getting potential customers who are attracted by the FabLab publicity. On the other side, the risk of not having a clear defined distinction between the company and the FabLab activities, often carried by the same people, could both distract from the non-profit nature of FabLab objectives and create tensions among voluntary people and payed company workers.

Even if there’s a clear distinction, it might also happen that the sponsoring companies tries to push the FabLab activities towards more commercially viable stuff.

University / School / Library / Museums

This kind of sponsorship is very useful, and probably the most common one, as well the form where the initial MIT Bits and Atoms Lab was funded. These kind of institutions might give away some space and resources without asking much in return. Furthermore they might make much easier to attract people interesting in training workshops and in using the FabLab’s resources for example to complete their term projects and find help in learning new stuff.

There are some downsides, too. University or other similar institutions might grant access only to students, and require the activities carried on in the lab to be in line with the academic standards.

Furthermore funding provided depends on “politics”, budgets and grants, often determined on a yearly basis, so additional money might be necessary from time to time.

But it’s obvious that the availability of a free space, electricity, water and other basic stuff makes it much easier to cover the rest of the costs.

3D printing and Laser-cutting service

Given that most smaller companies don’t have access to the fabrication tools available in FabLabs, many could find interesting to engage in a service business to fund the lab’s costs. This is especially true when the location allows to reach a wide audience of small companies which work in the design, fashion, furniture or manufacturing business.

But even this solution has some downsides. Both people and machines shouldn’t only be dedicated most of the time to the service business, or they won’t be able to be available for the normal FabLab activities. Again, the line between the business and the non-profit stuff should be marked clearly, as it might become quite blurry.

Consulting and Training

In a similar fashion as the point above, many FabLabs have skilled associates who could be consulting and training for companies in order to sustain the lab’s activities. The risk is similar, people resources are even more scarce than machines and the voluntary work should be treated as such.

As mentioned before the skills and will of motivated individuals is the key to the FabLab success, so this option should be really considered with care, as the risks of loosing the initial objectives are quite high.

Conclusions

I believe that the ideal business model for the FabLab should be a combination of all the models illustrated. A cultural institution should provide the space and utilities, considered the social role of the lab. Local companies could offer some sponsorship for specific events, or activities that could favor their business and provide some free publicity, but also be involved as customers for limited production and design services they might need from the lab. But as in startups it is mandatory to go after different income streams at the same time, doing so will guarantee the freedom to carry on the FabLab mission in an independent fashion.

]]>2013-07-12T11:29:00+02:00http://fablabstarter.com/blog/2013/07/12/makers-must-impact-societySome ideas on how makers should help the business community and their role in innovating the country.

A different perspective on how inventing the future should not stop us to think about the current times and the social issues surrounding us.

Introduction

I’m thinking to write this post since I started the blog.

I postponed it because I felt I needed a deeper understanding of the issue.

But also because I think this is one of the most important issues I want to address with my work and the lab I’m trying to setup.

Lots of people think of FabLabs and the Maker movement as the future way to work and provide value, that in the future will free us all from the current unfair and unsustainable business and labour environment.

But I think there’s much we can do NOW to address the issues of our society, with the technology and most important, culture brought by the movement.

In my opinion, makers should immediately start helping existing small businesses, which in my country are the majority and provide a huge percentage of jobs, that are struggling in the global economy.

Factories are closing, traditional artisan crafts are disappearing, lots of people is losing their jobs.

Some might say that the old “way” of working is dead, or destined to be so.

But there’s lot of good stuff that deserves to be saved from this sure end.

All these people have spent a significant amount of their life following their passion.

They are true makers, the ones that create beautiful things with their hands.

They don’t know technology, and maybe don’t even like it very much.

In my country, one third of the population has never accessed the Internet.

One of the other two thirds, don’t use it daily to solve their problems, share, learn and communicate ideas.

In this situation I think that today, the maker’s role should be different from the one we foresee for the future.

Technology-savvy people, inventors, creative are those who could help getting us all out of this situation.

For sure it is very exciting to be able to build products and sell them and be independent.

But nobody lives in a glass bubble. The society is strictly connected.

And the community wellbeing affects our lives too.

Technology transfer

During the last twenty years, the term “technology transfer” has been repeated and included in all kind of community development projects.

Millions or better billions of Euro have been spent to “speed up and facilitate” technology transfer between University and Technology Excellence Centres and those called SME (small and medium enterprises).

Well, except few cases, I must say that didn’t work very well, or at least not as expected. Otherwise we wouldn’t be facing this huge economic crisis.

People wouldn’t lose their jobs at this astonishing rate.

Sure the businesses are not innovating. True they don’t speak English, they are not addressing “globalization”.

Basically they are not accessing the wealth of technology and information needed to be competitive.

But what this has to do with FabLabs and Makers, you might ask.

Well, where technology transfer has failed, the makers could succeed.

Where researchers, professors, facilitators and all those who have tried to bring innovation to the SMEs, they failed.

Because they where expecting to find the same mental setting into the “crafts” people.

They didn’t talk the same language.

They where expecting small companies to shell out money on expensive equipment and methodology.

Or to adopt production processes which were too distant from the old business mentality.

A different way of thinking and providing technology transfer is what makers could do for small businesses.

The maker Tutor

What I propose is that every maker could help a business.

We, and I include myself as part of this, should “adopt” a business in a way a parent adopts a child.

We should explain that technology can be also a hack downloaded from the internet and not only the expensive product sold by white collar consultants. I admit I’ve been one of those some times ago, but at least sold them consultancy on open-source software.

We should tell them what is available now, what can be built on top of all of the off-the-shelf stuff available on the Internet.

We should show how new products can be built out of rapid prototyping and agile development. We should browse the Internet for and with them, provide suggestions, improve their crafts.

The Maker Tutor looks like a funny name, but at the end is just helping small business people the same you would help a guy showing up with a nice idea and providing him pointers on where to start.

Lifestyle

But there’s more. Makers should help old-fashioned businesses in other ways.

Because they learnt it is possible to start a business and build a product without hiring lawyers, consultants, and all the “professionals” which are just after their money.

Yes, i speak about the two thousand Euros per page web designers.

Makers should teach businesses to blog, go on social networks, share daily all their work and knowlege, build value out of it, as much as they do.

Another help could be to show how tele working is so easy today, how to use Skype and VNC to access the office PC and speak to customers.

We would see much happier people on the street, out of their boring, expensive offices, having a life apart from work.

Finally, the lifestyle.

Many makers and digital people make their living out of small earnings; build a sustainable life camping out of Europe, sharing offices in Co working spaces.

Grow their own crops, barter their services with neighbours.

Conclusions

Aside from inventing the next huge killer product, or most probably the next Arduino Controlled robot, the responsibility of other, less skilled or older members of our community rely on us.

I want them to help the small businesses; I want this to build wealth not only for me, but also for the benefit of all the community around me.

This is what I’m after, and what I ask you to do too.

]]>2013-07-11T14:20:00+02:00http://fablabstarter.com/blog/2013/07/11/my-fablab-surveyI spent the last few weeks trying to study the current state of the FabLab movement, my goal was to get a deeper understanding of how all these small groups of people agree on building a FabLab, how they organize it and the resources used to get it done.

I learnt few interesting facts that I think might be useful to my project and to those seeking similar goals.

Transparency

First of all I understood that while the maker movement preaches openness and transparency, very little information is shared about the FabLabs. Even finding one’s location is hard, not talking about information, about organization, funding and rules regulating them.

I think this creates a void, where people wanting to replicate this experience locally, must reinvent the wheel, wasting precious experience which instead should be summarized and made public.

Locations

One interesting fact is most FabLabs, at least at the current time, don’t have a fixed location, open to the public at fixed times. They are just groups of people, often kept together as non-profit associations.

These liquid organizations, while for sure composed by innovative and passionate makers, are mostly revolving around meetings, workshops and events where temporary, on spot labs are built with machines lensed by the single participants and self-owned.

I think that finding a physical space and having fixed opening hours makes a difference in transforming a group of hackers in something useful for the society. More about this in the next post.

Communication

I must also say that few of these organizations have serious communication problems. When asked about the availability of equipment for building a project, through social networks pages and email, they didn’t even bother to answer.

Maybe the fact that I’m not the “usual” tinkerer, but an IT entrepreneur in his late thirties and a white beard, scared them.

Cryptic websites, not very well organized or mobile friendly also don’t help to spread the message.

Well organized FabLabs

But luckily, several others did respond and where very helpful: I’m pretty sure very skilled and friendly people work in those organizations, and they understand that people and communication skills come first in this kind of projects.

The ones with an actual location for the FabLab are an interesting starting point for my research. They own or most probably have built the machines offered to the public.

They offer a Tutor for those using the machines for the first time, this helps a lot people not familiar with machines and open-hardware technologies. Even if collecting this “expert knowledge” into publicly accessible guides and screencast could be an additional improvement and let people prepare themselves before getting to the lab.

Sustainability

About sustainability, some of them have credit based systems, useful for rewarding tutors helping others and to “meter” resource usage in a well organized fashion. The organization itself is often modeled much after a Collective, the ones I was used to see among university students sharing study spaces and political movements.

Access to more information

I wasn’t able to gather much information about funding sources, but understood that association entry fees, workshop revenue and usage credits bought to use machines are a quite widespread model.

Much more information, in my opinion, can be only discovered directly interviewing the founders, and participating to the activities organized by each. This is one of the next steps of my research.

While I would love to be able to visit every FabLab in the world, it’s impossible to do for me at the current time for resource constraints. A new organization is popping out every day, and the movement is really spread around the world.

The FabLab directory and Online survey

For this reason I’m thinking to build a FabLab directory, where it would be possible to gather info about founders, addresses, facilities and rules of labs worldwide.

One way to build the directory would be conducting a proper online survey, also focused on the offered tools, machines, organization, logistic, learning and newbie support, and how or if the FabLabs achieve sustainability in the long run.

But I’m afraid of the lack of substantial feedback.

Reputation

Why? I’m not really into the movement yet, and probably reputation matters a lot in the movement. Is this acceptable? Is there any point I’m missing about the organization and resources? I’m going to ask to the Arduino founders and other well-connected makers about support in this process. And maybe also try to conduct a similar survey on makers, possibly at the October Maker Faire event in Rome.

Please comment!

I’d love to hear the opinion of any people involved in fablabs reading this! Please comment or write me directly.

UPDATE: 2013/07/12@lionzan kindly pointed out that a directory already exists at the (FabWiki)[http://wiki.fablab.is/wiki/Portal:Labs], I’m pretty sure that many FabLabs are not there (i.e. the Pisa one). Furthermore the information I would like to collect goes much more into detail. For sure this is a great starting point. Thanks Leonardo!.

]]>2013-07-05T09:02:00+02:00http://fablabstarter.com/blog/2013/07/05/the-lean-fablab-part-2-or-why-you-shouldnt-by-a-3d-printerIn the previous post I promised to give some more details on the techniques proposed by the Lean Startup methodology to validate a business hypothesis.

Let’s talk about one of the first that came to my mind: testing how much people is really interested in using your FabLab tools and which you should buy.

Some might think that in order to test a project, you should really start it, at least up to a given point. So they rush buying equipment, installing it, learning how to use it, only to finally discover it was not such a great idea.

All the effort spent on something, be it building a product, creating an organization, having a project kick-off, could eventually go wasted. This is the common approach, and it feels like a duty to go over this process: everybody does it this way.

But wasting resources is wrong! As already mentioned, any lean start-up should devote most of its initial resources in finding a sustainable business, not building it right away. Your FabLab is no different.

Let me bring you an example. During my career as an IT professional, I joined a meeting with the technical lead of one of the biggest TV broadcasters in Italy. We were discussing of building complex digital fingerprinting technologies for tracking pirated tv shows on the net, and he wasn’t very convinced. So he told his story.

Few years before he and his team were facing the issue of close captioning live tv shows. They surveyed the market finding few companies with such offerings. But none of them was providing the ability to recognize many different voices and have effective speech recognition of the spoken parts for each actor or performer.

After much study, they came up with an elegant solution, using the most complex software even written… the human brain! So they basically put a fast touch-typist in front of a keyboard and let him write the subtitles in real time.

Imagine how much cost-effective this solution shown to be compared to an intricate mix of hardware and software…

Let’s get back to the 3d printer now. There’s some kind of magic association between FabLabs and 3d printers. Any respected FabLab should have one, this is what the news says every day.

Using one, you can make things on your own and so on. So you and the other founders, like the FabLab instructable says, get some substantial money (even one thousand Euros is money for a startup!) and spend it on your shiny new machine.

Maybe you saved some extra bucks just by getting a Kit, to be assembled and soldered by yourselves. But wait. Let’s remember what we need to know to test our hypothesis.

Who is going to use it? And most importantly, what will they use it for?

Yes, owning a Makerbot or (insert here your favorite open hardware machine), could attract few people. They will be eager to make it work, just to discover it’s not so easy, after all.

People will grab things from thingverse and try to print them. Just to discover they don’t look like the picture, and if lucky, it took few dozen tentative to get it printed. Lots of wasted filament, power, and time. A quite frustrating experience!

Sure, you’ll learn how to use the few CAD/CAM open source programs. And if you assembled it you might also have learnt the basics of soldering.

But again, where is the value?

Truth is you and your team could have acquired those skills without buying any 3d printer! Cheap DIY electronics kits are much better ways to learn how to solder, and Blender any easy path to start modeling things. All this learning will be very useful when technology matures.

If you really want to test the interest in 3d printing from people and not owning one just for the sake of it, the Lean Startup would suggest you to act like you have one.

Yes, fake it. Put a big sign on your website or lab telling you’re making 3d prints for free for those in the local community who send you STL files.

Now sit and watch and learn.

This is not tricking people: you have many printers everywhere; you can rent them from services or borrow them from other FabLabs.

You might even offer help to build and fix the STL files. At some point you can also arrange a workshop on modeling and printing with a borrowed printer, and return it by the same day.

Even by handling every single file by yourself to an external service, and paying for it, will cost you much less then getting a cheap printer, and you’ll get much better results, plus some free consulting in fixing your models.

On the other side, if you get dozens of people every day asking for a free print, you might consider spend that extra buck and lease a professional printer. This experience, in my opinion, could really be eye opening.

In the end, the lesson here is not to rush things. You can test what works by faking it, then build on what people are really asking for.

A FabLab is not just a 3d printer, it’s a group of creative people making smart things, no matter how.

In the next post I’ll investigate another Lean tool, “getting out of the building” to help determine what successful FabLabs are doing and how.

]]>2013-07-02T15:15:00+02:00http://fablabstarter.com/blog/2013/07/02/the-lean-fablabReading the “Lean Startup” book from Eric Reis, I started thinking how his teachings could be applied to building and running a FabLab.

For those who think this stuff is just for software startups, it’s important to notice that such methodology has been developed on many of the values and concepts adopted since the 80s in the Toyota car company, famous for example for the invention of the now widely popular Just In Time (JIT) manufacturing. For this reason many suggest this book might teach some valuable lessons on strategy, and be applied to startups of any kind.

But beware: like most methodologies, this is no silver bullet. Every advice must be considered within the actual context and taken with common sense.

A FabLab as a startup

The central theme of the Lean Startup gravitates around the definition of a startup itself: an organization devoted to identifying a sustainable business.

While this might not be the main focus of a FabLab, it is obvious that sustainability is key for developing innovation. How else one might find the resources and why not, the personal rewards, if no value is produced? how do bills for components and utilities would get payed?

Furthermore, other common traits with “normal” startups might be the little number of people involved at the beginning, the need to find a space, recruit talents and create an audience, or a customer base in startup terms.

The build-test-learn process

The main approach suggested to reach the startup goals is that of continuos learning. Every activity should be focused on learning something about what works and what doesn’t and progress should be determined on this value only. A Lean Startup doesn’t jump straight away into something, committing all resources to it, but continuosly ajdusts its target by learning, betting on early failure to mitigate risks, till the point where it needs to pivot, finding new hypothesis to be tested in order to remain competitive.

But what could all of this ever mean for a FabLab?

Imagine you’re sitting in front of a bank clerk or a sponsor asking for a small loan, let’s say around 20k Euros (I’ll try to run a more in-depth cost analysis in further posts), just enough to open and equip your FabLab.

Testing hypothesis

The first thing you’d be asked is what your mission is. This is an easy one: “Create a place where common people could experiment and build prototypes of amateur projects using some of the lab resources for free, while companies would be paying to use the same plus some expert advice for building actual product prototypes whose mass production will be outsourced at a later time”.

Now imagine the bank clerk is a fan of the Lean Startup; he will first underline which are the hypothesis well hidden in your mission statement:

you will be able to find an affordable space (given your little budget) where tinkerers would love to spend significant time

a community of such people already exists but they don’t have such a place to go

you will be able to let people use those tools safely and productively

you will find enough companies willing to use the lab, and adequately pay for it, at least enough to cover all the cost plus some little profit, to be invested in keeping the lab running, and let you make a decent living

prototypes made in the lab will be easily “ported” to industrial services for mass production

Now, you’re probably thinking these are really a lot of questions to ask. But take a moment, how many business ideas based on just the intuition, soon become plain failures? The Lean Startup concept bases decisions on facts, the reality, not intuitions, the dreams.

Luckily it also gives few practical tools to check the reality:

getting out of the building

the MVP

split A/B testing

actionable metrics

pivoting

The next post will talk about these tools, and how they might help in our process building and running the FabLab.

]]>2013-06-28T10:15:00+02:00http://fablabstarter.com/blog/2013/06/28/starting-a-fablabWhen starting a new project, especially on our own, we should always ask ourselves if it’s worth the work and which are our expectations about it.

As an exercise I’ll try to summarize the goals I want to achieve with this project, and the motivations behind them. Others might share some of those; some probably don’t as they are strictly related to our local (italian) business and industrial environment.

A place for sharing, tinkering and learning

Since I was a university student I always dreamt about finding a physical space where enthusiastic people could meet and share their ideas, build something and learn something.

During the last twenty years, I actually founded a student group, and then two startups for this reason! While the student group and startups were quite successful and still exist today, all these organizations lacked a true culture for experimentation and sharing. In my opinion, that happened for several reasons: scarce resources for students, little innovation attitude for businesses.

When I first heard about FabLabs I thought my dream could finally come true. It’s now possible to create a physical space where people share and learn and build things. And it can become a business too!

A sustainable business

I think that one of the most interesting things about the maker movement, and about FabLabs in particular, is the fact that one can really build a business out of tinkering, learning and sharing.

This is a major depart from my previous experiences. From one side it won’t be necessary to seek approval from the University, no begging for funds or space. From the other, and I think this applies to many startups, any activity not strictly related to the business won’t be seen as wasted man hours, but an opportunity to expand the business with new products and services.

A FabLab should be the place where new products come to life, it should profit from tinkering, and invest those profits to be sustainable and expand the tools available.

An innovation catalyst

In my opinion tinkering is the only way to learn or invent something. By having the tools and innovators in a single place, innovation happens naturally. People bring in new ideas and build them together, something good must happen and it probably happen.

A community service

In Italy, and the whole Europe, unemployment rates for young people are skyrocketing. My local community, around Pisa, Italy, was primarily built on artisanal workshops mostly building furniture, leather goods and Vespa’s.

Nowadays most of the artisanal shops are closed, leather good production is being outsourced to other countries, and the company behind Vespa is not doing very well either.

I think the maker movement has lot to give for the employment of young people. But most of them lack the necessary knowledge to transform what were their parent’s skills into something that could be sold in the global market.

Our FabLab could become a learning space and a signal of hope for those people. The community should use it for free as much as possible.

Conclusion

Many stories around the world tell that this is all achievable. How to achieve it is the subject of this blog.